


Who Love a Synthesis

by Zabbers



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Episode AU: s10e06 Extremis, Episode AU: s10e11 World Enough and Time, Episode AU: s10e12 The Doctor Falls, Hurt/Comfort, Missy helps the Doctor help Missy help the Doctor, Or is it the other way around?, Other, Promptfic, actually AU for everything from Extremis, flashfic, with a coda-cameo
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-17
Updated: 2018-07-17
Packaged: 2019-06-11 18:09:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,931
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15321288
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zabbers/pseuds/Zabbers
Summary: When the Doctor comes to Missy looking for her help, she lends him her sight, not expecting the profound exchange that it becomes.(A roundabout response to these prompt questions: "Who is embarrassed when they have to wear their glasses and who thinks they look super cute? Who makes fun of the other for having a crush on them, and who has to remind them that they are in a relationship? Who kissed first?")





	Who Love a Synthesis

**Author's Note:**

  * For [grassangel](https://archiveofourown.org/users/grassangel/gifts).



"Hegelians, who love a synthesis, will probably conclude that he wears a wig."

A.

“You look less foolish than you think in those sunglasses.” 

“I don't look foolish. I look cool, I look groovy, I look like I'm ready to chill with the in crowd. Hashtag Big Aesthetic.”

For about a second, Missy is taken aback when the Doctor shows up in her dim little parlour wearing his Ray-Bans. Then, the pattern of his hesitations makes it clear that he’s using them to scan and receive data. They’re laggy, or--and this is when she understands that something is properly wrong--he’s still struggling to integrate the psychic inputs into his working mental models.

 _What have you done now?_ Missy thinks, certain that once again she’ll have to rescue him. 

With a guess at its efficacy, Missy lets him point his makeshift visual sensor at her while she unfastens her boots, her skirts hitched up around her stocking-clad calves. She leaves the boots out of the way under the piano. Silk is quiet. In silk stockings, she can walk across the concrete silently, if she chooses, working her way around the edges when he’s distracted until she's beyond the periphery of his scan, until she's behind him. 

They're sweet, actually, his sunglasses. Maybe not so much when he actually did think he looked _a la mode_ in them, but now that they're part of his new vulnerability, yes; now that he really has a reason to hide, she rather likes them. 

Still, she's going to take them away from him. This is why she's sneaking up behind him. It’s a kind of test.

His other senses are all fine, though, which is why it's a very delicate...operation...ha! She snatches the sunglasses straight off his face. Revealed, his eyes are milky, but they have no trouble at all being cross. It's all in the eyebrows. 

“Oi!” He makes a grab for her but meets empty air. 

“Crude,” she tuts, inspecting them, but also referring to his poor sense of her location in their shared space. “We could do so much better.”

“It's not that simple. The exposure damaged an area of my brain--”

“Yes, yes, I understand the biology. Have you considered using the… _you know what_...?”

“Borrow against my own future to heal the present? It might not even work.”

It’s true. She's heard terrible rumours about the technology she has in mind. Invented to serve as a field medical device of desperation, a way to keep fighting when not fighting meant the end of everything, it’s been said to destroy more than it saves, altering biodata irreversibly while granting only the most miserly of reprieves.

Her hand darts out to brush him, skin to skin. It's an old, repressed instinct, when one Time Lord has been injured and another wants to help. When they were children, it had been natural, generous. But it’s been a long time since she's been allowed to touch him. Seventy years…

He flinches but lets her in his head--to her surprise. He sags into her as her fingers find better contact points with his face. Maybe they tremble, or maybe she’s only imagining it. She hadn't expected to do this for a millennium. 

There's a missing strand of energy in him, a reserve that should be there but isn't. She probes the edges of the lacuna, and it tastes of serpents, of something all too familiar...of Skaro. Anger flares in her, but he puts it out. 

_I gave willingly. Even if it was a trick. And this time, too, I knew._

_Oh, Doctor. This is the price of goodness?_

_Worth it, every time._

_Let me help._

_Yes. Exactly._

 

B.

She's his eyes when the monks come. Not in the simulation, which is an obvious fake (try as the poor dears might to understand the partnership growing itself between Time Lord minds like the trunks of trees fusing together), but in the real world, the manifest reality, when the pyramid lands and the soldiers show up and the Doctor saves the world, Missy in tow, out on the town. 

The Doctor saves the planet Earth. Missy saves the Doctor. She could get used to this. 

They're celebrating, after, Missy and the Doctor and the others--the one with the dangerous compassion and the one with the dodgy organs--Missy luxuriating in the tug and tension of her mental connection with the Doctor. The strands of it stretch and pull and fold and thicken as she moves back and forth across his office, boiled sugar confectionery softening on the apparatus of his need. Always, the awareness of his thoughts peeking through her eyes, his personality passing across the windows behind her consciousness.

After the crisis, she reclaims her body, so that he must ask for the use of her senses, but in the field, he’d needed control of her vision, and she had given it to him. 

She’s singing something, half to herself, happy, when it occurs to her that the Doctor is happy too. It takes effort to unwind his feelings from her own, but it is unmistakably his happiness, like tasting the interior of his mouth, sweet and cold. She directs her gaze at his face so that they both look at him. It reads like eye contact, she supposes, from the outside. He casts his arm into the air for her; she allows him to reel her in, landing tucked into his side.

Nardole and Bill exchange...something knowing, but something scandalised too, something uncomfortable--a wink, a raised eyebrow, and the shuffle of an animal tensing itself to run. They make their synchronous excuses, Bill claiming an early start, Nardole yawning and stretching.

“They think you _like_ me,” Missy teases when they're alone. She purses her lips in a moue. “Are they right? Do you have a teensy crush on me?”

The Doctor contemplates her question, holding her hand. He doesn’t want to answer, but he won’t deny her either. At length, he gives it a squeeze. “We wanted to see the universe together, you and I, and we never could. Now I need you to see just one star.”

It should be enough. It’s _more_ \-- But Missy is uneasy. What happens when she missteps? What happens when she loses his trust? What happens when she can’t let him have her eyes, when she needs her body for herself? 

“You’re my oldest friend,” he continues when she doesn’t speak, coaxing. “Woven into me. The Doctor and the Master. Our own people often spoke of us in one breath. The first time you held my hand, I heard your whisper in the space between my hearts, and I’ve strained to hear it ever since. What makes you think I haven’t liked you all along?”

He floods love into their shared mental space, reassurance. Spliced together like this, they’re living a foregone conclusion. In such conditions of necessity, there’s not the innermost place for doubt. 

 

x.

It’s a Saturday like any other. Pull up a star chart. Pick a distress call. Their usual outing. He calls it ‘grazing’. Missy calls it ‘brunch’.

But when the TARDIS wheezes into being on the doorstep of a black hole, the Doctor settles into his favourite alcove with a baggie of crisps, boots up, legs extended, which means he's there for the foreseeable. 

“Just what do you think you’re doing?”

“You go.”

“And what about you?”

“I'm going to stay here and monitor you.”

Missy tries to put her hands on her hips, but the Doctor is using them to move a viewscreen without getting grease on the handles. “Excuse me, that is not what letting you into my head is for. You're the one who likes to run around saving the universe.”

“I thought you were enjoying yourself.”

 _With_ you.

 _It's about time you were back to learning how to be good. And it’s not like I won’t be right there with you. In here._

The Doctor taps his head, and Missy sort of admits that the only difference is they’ll have a backup, watching from a safe and comfortable back seat.

So: when the colony ship cameras look, they see only one Time Lord body, neither dissembling nor disingenuous when it does a twirl and proclaims itself ‘Doctor Who’. It’s this Time Lord body that fails to take the gun from the little blue man or to stand between it and the fragile form of the human companion. This is the body that instructs Bill to wait as the proto-Cybermen cart her away, that wastes no time in riding the lift towards self-destruction, down, down, the connection between the minds attenuating vertiginously as time slides out of sync. Crisps spill over the console-room decking. The strain is bearable--just. 

At the bottom of the descent, Missy finds herself. 

“Give us a kiss,” the Master says. 

 

Their first kiss is lost to time, one of a series of play kisses, of pliable seals on vows that could never have been kept, pleasant experiments left behind among the tall grasses like forgotten toys, childish spontaneities. 

When the Master, defeated and bewildered by his future self’s mutualism with his best enemy, leaves her dying by his own hand in the undergrowth, the Doctor finally remembers that he, too, has a body, that his body, too, can save. 

His TARDIS materialises around Missy; he tumbles to his knees by her side, fumbling for her hand, her cheek. 

If kisses rescue, this is a kiss that will do it: one Time Lord’s gift to another, but also one friend’s promise to another, long, long owed, and a debt more recently incurred. Life, the gift of the self, an emissary of possibility in a golden, branched arc, or like an incorporeal pearl, incandescent. 

_Let me help. Let me be kind. To you._

Missy wakes to find her head curiously empty, her senses disconcertingly her own. 

“Doctor?”

She presses her fingers to her lips. The touch of them against his is the last impression of their shared mind, fading already to memory. Their commons of perception won’t survive the regeneration of either of them; in this case, his, in payment for her survival.

Already, the spare, haggard body glows. It’s in a state of grace, a state of flow. The wild hair seems suddenly wilder, heath-blown and wind-scrubbed. The light floods the cuffs and the collar, a train approaching through a tunnel. It cuts the dark fabric. It fills the forfeit eyes. Then the light becomes lightning.

Then the eruptions. Then the explosions. 

 

Then they’re falling, falling through the air, the Doctor delighted, grinning. She reaches across the slipstream, her fingers looking for Missy’s. 

“Look at us!” she shouts, “Look at what we’ve done!”

“What? Got ourselves shaken out of your TARDIS like pebbles from a shoe?”

“No! We saved them! _You_ saved them! You saved them all!”

Their hands find each other and they latch on, splaying themselves like parachutists. 

“I’m so proud of you! I knew you could do it!”

It’s all well and good for the Doctor, who is giddy from regeneration, and will probably bounce on impact or liquefy and reaggregate like a sponge, but Missy has concerns. 

The Doctor’s manic, toothy smile turns into bemusement. “Did I kiss you?”

“Yes.”

“Can I do it again?”

“No!” Missy’s frantic, focussed on the one thing she is best at finding--a way to live. “Not right now, dear.”

There it is: her umbrella, floating beside them as though they’re drifting leisurely down Alice’s rabbit hole. 

“Maybe...later.”


End file.
